Skywriting

Think of a number. Double it.
Multiply that, for argument’s sake,
by some astronomical figure to find
the rate at which the universe
is speeding into pieces or how many
depleted stars are concentrated
into ravenous black holes.
Round up the answer with your
calculating mind as you try to come
to terms with zeroes lined up to infinity:
so many light-years for truth to dawn,
so many theories of dark matter,
so many millennia until night falls
on our universe and everything
on earth comes down to nothing—
like nothing on earth you could
imagine in a billion years.

Difficult to second-guess what might
happen next, what climate of fear
we have coming to us in the future.
But, over today’s horizon, May
appears in perfect working order,
seen in the best possible light;
bringing out the colour in furze bushes,
granting leaves a seasonal reprieve.
Butterflies contrive a soft landing
on extravagant polyanthus.
Grain shoots are gaining ground.
Sprays of rowan disperse scent.
And a still-gentle sun caresses
the brow of the hill: a cow
licking her newborn calf.

- Excerpts from the poem by Dennis O’Driscoll

The authority of beauty.

What kind of beauty?

Not the beauty which is linear, and requires a purging of the flesh: Beauty of contour, of bone, of profile, of silky hair and the flare of delicate nostrils. (The beauty that, after first youth, must diet, that wills itself to be thin.) This is the beauty that emerges from self-confidence, class confidence. That says, I am not born to please. I am born to be pleased.

Not that beauty, the beauty arising from privilege, from will, from artifice, but one almost as authoritative: The beauty of someone who has to fight for a place and can take nothing for granted. Beauty which strokes itself with parted full lips, inviting the touch of others. Beauty which is generous and leans toward the admirer. I can change, yes, but I want to please you.

(…)

What do you do with beauty? You admire it, you praise it, you embellish it (or try to), you display it; or you conceal it.

Could you have something supremely beautiful and not want to show it to others? Possibly, if you fear their envy, if you worry that someone will come and take it away. Someone who steals a painting from a museum or a mediaevel manuscript from a church must keep it hidden. But how deprived the thief must feel. It seems most natural to exhibit beauty, to frame it, to stage it – and hear others admire, echo your admiration.

(…)

What is beauty without a chorus, without the whispers, the sighs, the murmurs?

- From The Volcano Lover by Susan Sontag

What happened to your wife, the dancer?

When it rains, the dead descend.
You appear, so real I can smell the rainwater in your hair,

can touch the circle I placed on your finger.
And the box that our future was wrapped in,

does the scent of happiness still linger
on the paper, the velvet, the ribbon?

Your lips, clear of the color you always wear,
are not new to me, they’re lovely and bare;

and our old argument still turns, it burns.
How soon will you forget me if I die?

By the water in my eye and the way it returns, I swear:
If I forget you, let the world die.

When it rains, the dead ascend. You disappear
where I can’t follow: into the upper air.

- Jeet Thayil

Thayil’s These errors are correct is a haunting collection of poems. This one, in particular, sears right through me. Here’s a review I had written.

Questions

If on a summer afternoon a man should find himself
in love with only one woman
in a sea of women, all the others mere half-naked
swimmers and floaters, and if that one woman
therefore is clad in radiance
while the mere others are burdened by their bikinis,
then what does he do with a world
suddenly so small, the once unbiased sun
shining solely on her? And if that afternoon
turns dark, fat clouds like critics dampening
the already wet sea, does the man run—
he normally would—for cover, or does he dive
deeper in, get so wet he is beyond wetness
in all underworld utterly hers? And when
he comes up for air, as he must,
when he dries off and dresses up, as he must,
how will the pedestrian streets feel?
What will the street lamps illuminate? How exactly
will he hold her so that everyone can see
she doesn’t belong to him, and he won’t let go?

- Stephen Dunn

Romita sent me this, and I woke up to read it. What a lovely start to the day: Poetry and coffee.

Gagan Gill

Gagan Gill is one of my favourite poets. Her work is spare, stripped of excessiveness. The poems ring with controlled emotion; powerful, but oddly detached. Here are some lines I like from different poems.

Sometimes the love
of a lifetime
fades away
face to face with a dream
(From For Nancy)

She will need him
Like a sin,
Like a virtue
And will return in her body
Like a hidden wound.

(From She will come back in her body)

When love arrives on your doorstep, it will not leave soon.
It has to go to some mountain or valley. To an ocean or river.
It comes to your house out of the blue, and wants to know if
you will come along to drown with it or not.
Every love gives you enough time to die for it.

(From Every Love)

I won’t come and tell you
that these days I’m a star
lonely as stars

I won’t come and tell you

that these days
there is broken glass
in my breath

that gods pass
one by one
inside me
to revive an ancient ache

(From I won’t come and tell you)

What he said

What could my mother be
to yours ? What kin is my father
to yours anyway ? And how
did you and I meet ever ?
But in love.
Our hearts have mingled
like red earth and pouring rain.

- Chempulapeyarinar

(translated by AK Ramanujan)

The interesting thing about this beautiful poem is that no-one has been able to determine the gender of its poet. The name given to the poet actually means – the poet of this poem (this explanation makes a lot more sense when you read the poem in Tamil).

But ’tis strange;
And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s
In deepest consequence

- Shakespeare, from Macbeth

Sometimes It Rains

The ready perfumes of summer’s middle days,
Creosote, creosote after rain, rain

Bringing up the last of the orange-blossom smell,
The droplets of water rousing the fallen leaves

Enough to make a moment come back to life in them,
A second once more of something, a moment from when

They were white and waxy and alive with themselves.
But night comes, too, to gather this moment,

Even as we want it to stay, even as we will not go inside.
The creosote, the orange blossoms, the hot honeysuckle

Flowers in the desert moonlight, the shadows of yucca,
Those sharp fronds, they make a full burst of daggers

Black on the gray-colored ground of the early evening.
The ocher and pink colors of this place in daytime

Are parts of one color at night, so that to see them
One has to breathe in. And breathing in:

This has the curious effect of rain itself in that moment—
The smell rousing us to what we know inside ourselves.

But that is not the end of it, a rainy day turning itself
Into a moist evening full of crickets.

This place is no different from any other, and rain is rain
Here as much as anywhere. But something happens

In the desert after rain has come. We sleep a good sleep
That night. In the morning, we get up and find ourselves

Standing on the shore of the new world. In the desert,
We watch, if we’re careful, and when we point at everything

We are complicit in the great magician’s trick of the rain:
Rain falls down wet and gets up green.

Delphiniums in a Window Box

Every sunrise, even strangers’ eyes.
Not necessarily swans, even crows,
even the evening fusillade of bats.
That place where the creek goes underground,
how many weeks before I see you again?
Stacks of books, every page, characters’
rages and poets’ strange contraptions
of syntax and song, every song
even when there isn’t one.
Every thistle, splinter, butterfly
over the drainage ditches. Every stray.
Did you see the meteor shower?
Did it feel like something swallowed?
Every question, conversation
even with almost nothing, cricket, cloud,
because of you I’m talking to crickets, clouds,
confiding in a cat. Everyone says,
Come to your senses, and I do, of you.
Every touch electric, every taste you,
every smell, even burning sugar, every
cry and laugh. Toothpicked samples
at the farmers’ market, every melon,
plum, I come undone, undone.

- Dean Young

Bleecker Street

Indeed,
this street is a wave of advocacy
and streaming window peonies and tulips,
a fierce glimpse of history, an echoing
of nightly gunshots, a flag of black pigeons
flowing east toward the end of a continent,
a hunger for immortality, a tiny brusque city,
a bickering idea, a useless boutique,
a fertile song widening into a love for all that lives.

- Philip Schultz